It's ok to be a (re)beginner
We all start somewhere.
In elementary school, roller skating was a big deal. It was the lure for joining 4-H, which held skating parties at the roller rink twice per school year. (Nothing at all against 4-H. I just didn’t have an affinity for farming or homemaking, which were its main emphases at the time.) And why wouldn’t I want to skate? There was great music, including by some hair bands that were not necessarily on the parental “approved” list. The rink had good snacks. And occasionally the DJ would announce COUPLE and LADIES’ CHOICE skates, which was as close as I was getting to dating in the sixth grade.
Well, here’s why: I broke my arm skating. On my 9th birthday. At the beginning of my birthday party. I was honestly glad that my friends got to stay and enjoy themselves, but it was a real bummer to be in the ER as they were feeling the motion-generated breeze in their hair and the electric guitar strains of those awesome songs.
If you’ve ever hurt yourself, been really hurt, or downright failed while doing something, you might have been reluctant (and with good reason) to do that thing again.
But you know what I have found? Skating is still fun. The music is still good. (I regret to inform that the snacks aren’t what they used to be, at least where I go.) Thankfully, the DJ does not announce special skates for couples or ladies’ choice, because nobody of any age needs that pressure. And now my son enjoys skating too. So we go several times a year on school breaks.
I feel like a baby deer trying to stand on my skates. Every. Single. Time. Our rink has no rails (the horror!), so I shuffle along, stopping every time around the rink for the first thirty minutes because my lower body hurts so badly from stress-clinching every muscle in it. I remember my fall and the dip in my forearm that made it pretty clear that I’d broken it. I don’t want that to happen again, especially now that I have care of another human being.
I’m sure in this first thirty minutes that I am making everyone else nervous too, wondering when the middle-aged lady will break a hip. But when I stay with it long enough, I start to remember what it feels like to glide to the music. How good it is to move my body. How I can still do this thing all these years later. And how it helps me connect with my kid, way younger than me but having just as good a time as I am.
I know a broken arm is not the same, of course, as having your life completely upended by disease, divorce, being terminated, or any number of hard things. And there certainly are parts of our lives we might want to leave behind forever in the wake of such events. But if there is something that you want to try again that might bring you joy or use your gifts or make the world a little bit better, it might just be worth wobbling on your baby deer legs to see if you can do it. Before long, that hard thing might make you wiser about it, better at it, or make you appreciate it all the more.